IP: The Death of Copyright

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2000 18:32:48 -0700
> From: "Tim O'Reilly" <tim () oreilly com>
> To: farber () central cis upenn edu
> Subject: The Death of Copyright
>
> Energetic and readable article on the atrocities being performed on
> copyright law.  Mostly focuses on music, but has some interesting
> historical anecdotes and some great sidebar quotes:
>
>    http://www.macedition.com/soup/soup_20000627a.shtml
>
> I'm a publisher, and I agree that copyright law is getting way out of
> hand.  Between software patents and extensions to copyright, we're
> undermining the foundations of our culture's past success, which has
> been based on free exchange of ideas.  Here's to the coming dark ages!
>
> An excerpt:
>
> > In the past century, though, the wealthy and powerful have been 
> lobbying long
> > and hard through international consortiums such as WIPO to shift the 
> balance of
> > power back to the publisher. Fourteen years became thirty. Then seventy 
> five years.
> > Then it became the life of the copyright holder. Then it became life plus
> > thirty. Now it's life plus seventy years, applied retroactively, and 
> ninety-five
> > years if the copyright holder is a corporation instead of a person. No 
> copyright
> > held by a corporation has passed into the public domain since the first 
> World
> > War. Nothing at all has passed into the public domain since the end of the
> > second world war unless the author donated it. As bad as that is, the 
> fallout
> > from the murder of copyright in the music industry is far, far worse. 
> You see,
> > most of the music you hear on the radio is considered "work for hire", 
> which
> > means even though the artist created and performed the music, the 
> record studio
> > owns all rights to it. This was unpleasant, but accepted by early recording
> > artists, because, after all, work for hire reverted from its owner to its
> > creator after 35 years. This was changed under the Digital Millennium 
> Copyright
> > Act so record companies, immortal entities, now own the copyrights in 
> effective
> > if not literal perpetuity. Tom Petty and Metallica will never own the 
> music they
> > wrote and performed while under a "work for hire" clause.
> >
> > Copyright is dead, a murder most foul, and the effect it's had on our 
> society,
> > civilization, and culture is heartbreaking.
>
>
>
> --
> Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
> 101 Morris Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472
> +1 707-829-0515, FAX +1 707-829-0104
> tim () oreilly com, http://www.oreilly.com